CAN YOU HEAR ME

I found this at Worldless Tech. It's pretty cool. Based on my result, I think it probably coincides with reality fairly well. The actual hearing test starts at 2:21 into the show. The rest is just bumfff.

LOOKS PRETTY HEALTHY TO ME

From the usual source of mal-science and bad-information comes the latest food safety trolling from the New York Times.

The report sounds pretty bleak.

If you are already elbow-deep in holiday cake and cookie batter, you may just want to take your chances and stop reading here.

Tasting uncooked foods made with flour can make you dangerously ill, according to a study published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. The report, which recounts the detective work that led to a recall of more than 10 million pounds of flour in the summer of 2016, confirms that a type of E. coli bacteria previously discovered lurking in wet environments like hamburger meat and leafy vegetables can also thrive in arid hosts.

 Dr. Neill called their work “absolutely dogged.” Researchers went through tiers of inquiry, asking patients about their food-prep and eating around the time they became ill. Tasting raw baking dough was a common factor. 

In addition to refraining from tasting uncooked flour dishes, she advised people to wash their hands in hot, soapy water after handling flour,...

It certainly looks dangerous to me

Ms. Chang, winner of the 2016 James Beard Award for Outstanding Baker, carefully sifted through her own risk analysis. At last she broke the news to some of her bakers. 

“They all laughed at me,” she said.

CITIES IN FLIGHT

A very good read. A dystopian book that I enjoyed. Those are rare. Something I was reading tonight triggered a flashback to the story of New York City in flight under Mayor Amalfi. I think it was the Mad Dogs of Thor V. It was definitely Russian. They drive like my sister.

You might enjoy this no pasaran piece. It talks about the media. As a former, respected member of the media (I used to have a paper route for the astute Newport Daily News), he makes some excellent points about how things are going in my second profession.

On the gripping hand, read and enjoy.

A SPRITZ OF DDT SOLVES THE PROBLEM

There is some concern about visiting Brazil for the Olympics this summer. I am not concerned. I will also not be attending the Games. As I read this article, it called to mind the easiest and most efficient means of getting rid of Zika before the Games. It really is as simple as spraying the province with DDT. Everywhere.

No more mosquitoes = no more Zika virus. It's ironic how this solution, hit upon by a number of brilliant physicians at the turn of the 19th century, resulted in little things like the Panama Canal. General Gorgas didn't concentrate on the virus anymore than people dealing with plague tried to conquer the virus. He, like them, focused on eradicating the disease vector.

Honestly, how hard is that?

Do not suffer a mosquito to live.

Except these. These are absolutely OK mosquitoes.

HYDROGEN FUSION

There was a graphic that I cannot find now. It discussed the use of fusion technology to convert seawater into freshwater. It made the point that this has actually been going on for a long time now. Eons. We call it solar evaporation and it's where the rain comes from.

TALE OF TWO FOOD LABELS

Vermont has declared that they will know if their food is genetically modified. They will know it because they passed a law requiring food sellers to label all such modified foods and they will fine the companies if they try to sell good, wholesome, approved by the FDA, foods in Vermont. There is another label that companies could put on their genetically modified food products, Not Authorized For Sale in Vermont.

The article made much of how tiny Vermont with its population of 600,000 people had just made a national change to food labeling. Sure. Can you imagine what would happen if Coke decided to simply label its product, Not For Sale in Vermont and left it at that? I know, they'd lose market share to Pepsi in a minuscule market and then you'd see hordes of people smuggling Coke across the border, at night, in high speed cars, armed to the teeth to fight off revenuers and hijackers! It would be another colossal TV movie franchise featuring the mustache as a bandit.

I'm not on the board at Coke or any of the other true giants of industry, but that's how I'd vote. It is time to let people face the consequences of being shallow, stupid, moronic tools of the shadowy leftist global agenda to spurn America. And, the titans of industry could carefully explain to the Vermont authorities that they aren't going to pay any fines. They had nothing to do with all that stuff showing up in Vermont and perhaps Vermont needs to tighten up their border security and deal with the smugglers and traffickers and leave honest shrubbers alone.

Yet another modest proposal humbly submitted to the void.

AFTER THE LIFELESS SPRING

This is a link to an article at The New Atlantis about DDT. It's a rather powerful and reasoned history on the deployment and employment of DDT around the world and how its use was terminated by hysterics here and everywhere. As you get to the end of the brief article, it might strike you who we are talking about when we say hysterics. Here's a hint:

My own doubts came when DDT was introduced for civilian use. In Guyana, within two years it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time the birth rate had doubled. So my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem.

—Alexander King, cofounder of the Club of Rome, 1990

The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.
A free race cannot be born of slave mothers.
Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts 

                                                        —Margaret Sanger       

The The World Health Organization sees no option to combating mosquitos except manmade genetic mutations and enhanced radiation weapons. Which is kind of funny, in a grim macabre sort of funny.

They sail under false flags, but at the core of their being is a desire to limit your being. For them, people will always be the problem.

They're making a better world

REMOTE VIEWING

Now this is my kind of remote viewing. I really do need to try harder to keep up. All kinds of things are happening in the cosmos even though we never get to see them here in MetroParkCentralis.

Who knew we were taking actual photographs of planets orbiting other suns?

THE SHIP OF THE IMAGINATION

Interesting read in The Wall Street Journal on the 18th. [link works now]

In 1980, on the premiere episode of the PBS series “Cosmos,” astrophysicist Carl Sagan flew a “Ship of the Imagination,” transporting his viewers to a liberated vision of science. Sagan refused to repress the centrality of the imagination to the scientific process—a dark secret that had been hidden if not denied by most practitioners since the mid-19th century. For many of those seeking to establish the cultural legitimacy of their technical roles—the term “scientist” was first coined in 1833—the imagination was disreputable. Scientists proclaimed the distinctive rationality and objectivity of their profession. In their heart of hearts, they knew about the creative wellsprings of science, but their lips were sealed. Not all scientists lived such a double life: Albert Einstein declared, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” But he also neglected to brush his hair or wear socks, a bohemian exception that proved the sober rule.

A ship of the imagination with a wave in its future

The literary genre of science fiction was explicitly established in the mid-1920s to provide scientists with the fanciful ideas they publicly disavowed. Amazing Stories, the first magazine devoted to SF, asserted in 1928 that science fiction “takes the basis of science . . . and then adds a thing that is alien to science—imagination. It lights the way. 

Ship of the Science Fiction imagination. They're always running aground.

It was an interesting article.

POOR PITIFUL NEWSWEEK

Newsweek came to our attention again for the first time in a while. I was lulled to their site by a siren blogpost and found this upon my arrival there.

It looks like it was a rich piece of make believe reporting from 1995 about how the internet would never catch on but it's hard to tell given the depths to which the rag has sunk in the 21st century. I admire the chuzpah of the diseased NYC elite that imagine anybody at all would pay 25 cents more for a single issue than the entire magazine was worth when it was sold for $1.

I'm surprised it's still published. On the other hand, there is sometimes cheer to be had by watching the flailing of others particularly if they're progressives who know better than you.

Those interested in a subtle appreciation of the world wide web as nirvana may enjoy reading Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. In it, one of his characters 'dies' and his soul is broadcast into the Van Allen Belt.

BLUE ORIGINS

Color me impressed. As I read about McCain's response to United Launch Alliance's refusal to bid on putting defense satellites into orbit because they can't get an exemption from the requirement to use 'made in America' rocket engines, I suspect the opportunity Bezos saw in putting together his launch team years ago is about to pay off.

It's funny the article made no mention at all about the imbecility of putting U.S. Military Space Operations at risk every time we launch a satellite into space using a a defective Russian rocket engine. You'd think there'd be some thought put into actually surrendering all of our access to space and giving sole custody of orbit to Russia. Well, you would unless you were a complete imbecile.

Even if the Russian government does not cut off the supply to ULA of imported RD-180 engines, the US Congress, with emerging support from the Air Force, has come around to a view that it would not be advantageous to the US government to start up a US production line to produce the RD-180.

RETROGRADE ORBIT

The world appears to have settled into reverse for a bit and I'm trying to ignore it but it bleeds through everything. One literally cannot observe American news without boggling at the stupidity of Hillary Clinton and the concomitant reality that democrats will vote for her en masse because there is nobody else in the field that comes close. Still, this is over the top even for them, isn't it?

How lost to reality must one be to hold the position that muslims have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism? I've seen the numbers and they aren't good. A moderate muslim won't lift a finger to stop, hinder or protest the actions of the most fundamental muslim terrorist. That way lies death and they know it. It's always been that way. You thought Salman Rushdie unique because every muslim wants him dead for blasphemy? Think again. Many don't know or care about him but they won't support his right to flout the muslim law that demands he be killed on sight for blasphemy.

Sometimes the Universe Appears to Throw a Curve Ball

It's a bit like global warming hysteria. All of the most detailed and carefully measured data in the world HAS GOT TO BE MASSAGED by warmists in order to force it to correspond to the 'reality' they believe is imposed by their MODELS. That's not reality though. It doesn't even look that way and yet watching the major media and the democrats spin all this fakery is getting old. Like poor Mars, they don't even notice that they are going backward whilst shouting Progress!

ANTHROPOGENIC DENIAL SYNDROME

The latest update on where the world stands with regard to Global Warming at Watts Up With That.

Denialism is defined as “the practice of creating the illusion of debate when there is none.” In climate the problem is those who label others deniers are the real deniers. They don’t even acknowledge there is a debate to deny. 

Even the Pope denied the deniers by excluding them from his climate conclave while he ordered priests to forgive those who had abortions. Apparently there are limits to Papal forgiveness. Sadly he doesn’t know enough to know who the real deniers are, which tends to dent infallibility. There is a long list including the President of the US and his cabinet, most world leaders, a majority of the world’s politicians, all environmental groups and their followers, and most with a left political leaning. Sadly, most have no understanding of the science, but typically they have very definitive positions; it is emotional and politically fuelled ignorance.

and much more.

THE SCIENCE OF APOCALYPSE

Jerry Pournelle at Chaos Manor writes a damning indictment of global warmingology.

Man made climate change is in the same situation except that there are no lab experiments; but their models do no predict the past, so why should we believe they will predict the future? We know it has been warmer (in Viking times, and probably in Roman times), and rather than ex[plain that they adjust the data. I don’t know how to measure the temperature of my city block to a tenth of a degree; when they can do that reliably I will believe they know the Earth temperature to that accuracy. When you can take the conditions of 1950 as input to a model and run it and it gives today’s conditions, I will take the model seriously; but I cannot see any reason to spend billions of dollars on measures there is no real evidence to show we need. I like Los Angeles without smog. I don’t worry a lot about CO2 “pollution”. But then I don’t invest in green technology.

As I read the news about witchfinders in climate science I am struck by the hysteria with which the warmists approach the apocalypse they alone predict. They are not people I would trust with a gun because I have no doubt they would use it to compel all the rest of us to obey the hysterical nonsense they spout.

NATIONAL REVIEW SLINKS INTO DISGRACE

I took a look at the current state of Michael Mann's lawsuit against Mark Steyn, National Review, et al and left with great contempt for National Review. Steyn puts it best.

There are times when I wish I had the same kind of co-defendants I had in my free-speech wars in Canada: Maclean's, unlike National Review, is a dentist's waiting-room mag not an ideological mission, but they and I were as one in our fight not just against the Canadian Islamic Congress but against the now repealed Section 13. By contrast, National Review, for whom I wrote for a decade and a half, are offering the curious and fainthearted defense that they were never my publisher but merely an "interactive computer service provider" to which I had the access code (see page 49 of their most recent brief). They're a court filing or two from claiming they're Lufthansa and I'm Andreas Lubitz - just some crazy guy who locked himself in the NR cockpit. 

Oh, well. For all that, I've never felt more optimistic about how this case is going. If there is a "97 per cent consensus" on the science, all 97 per cent decided to steer well clear of Michael E Mann: Last fall, not a single amicus brief was filed on his behalf, not one. He claims he's "taking a stand for science", but evidently science is disinclined to take a stand for him.

On the other hand, and somewhat to my surprise, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Reporters Committee for Press Freedom, the American Society of News Editors, the Association of American Publishers, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (The Village Voice et al), NBC Universal, Bloomberg News, the publishers of USA Today, Time, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The Detroit Free Press, The Seattle Times, The Arizona Republic and The Bergen County Record have all filed amici briefs against his attempted shredding of the First Amendment. They're in no way fans of mine, but they recognize that this is the most consequential free-speech case before the US courts since New York Times vs Sullivan, and if Mann wins it would be a catastrophic defeat for the First Amendment. That said, on global warming and "climate change", they largely agree with him. But I've also been heartened to learn how many scientists across the spectrum want nothing to do with Mann (scroll down here), and regard a defeat for him in court as a victory for genuine science.

It's funny how the science of man made global warming is collapsing all around except in the dim-witted minds of alarmists and governments hell bent on screwing the tax payer out of more money in order to fix a global climate scare that all rational beings admit simply cannot be fixed. All they talk about is slowing the rate of increase by forcing the first world to join the third world in grinding poverty and starvation but there is never any talk about reversing the global effects of solar infall variation that has, over the eons, caused the world to warm and cool. Their insane shrieks of doom fall on ears increasingly deaf to people who so obviously manipulate the data and then lie about it.

They make laughing stocks of real scientists and researchers and have thoroughly trashed the time honored process of peer review. They have also, with the help of its own lawyers, destroyed the reputation of National Review.

HAPPY VERNAL EQUINOX

Super Moons, Total Eclipses, lions and tigers and bears, oh MY.

As usual now for these astronomical phenomena I expect a total overcast as darkness falls here in MetroParkCentralis. I swear the last good thing we got to see here was the transit of Venus. That however, happened on a beautiful day.

Welcome to Spring!

MINDBOGGLINGLY STUPID

You have to get up really early in the morning to be stupider than these stupid cretins:

Europe's power operators are bracing for potential disruption from the solar eclipse expected Friday, which will knock out almost all solar-generated electricity in an "unprecedented" test for the network. 

"The risk of an incident cannot be completely ruled out," the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (Entso-e) said recently, as 100 times more power is generated from the sun now than during the last eclipse in 1999. 

"Solar eclipses have happened before but with the increase of installed photovoltaic energy generation, the risk of an incident could be serious without appropriate countermeasures," the group said. 

"For the first time this is expected to have a relevant impact on the secure operation of the European power system," warned Entso-e.

The dark of night never threatens Europe where it is always sunny 24 hours a day. What kind of idiot at the journal published this stupid bunch of drivel. Are they nothing but Al Gore's over there? Even the comments are ridiculous.

MAPPING THE FALL OF DARKNESS

It's  hard to believe that the Daily Mail could write such an ignorant and shallow piece about the spread of Islamic terror without getting any of the important details.

How did they miss the muslim terror attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the hijacking and murder of every passenger on 4 American airliners, the London bus bombing, the Spanish train bombing, the cold blooded daylight murder of a British soldier outside his barracks in London, the ongoing assault on individual liberty and civil rights wherever muslims hold sway? Let's not forget that the attackers who hijacked our planes were Saudi citizens and lived in America for years where they masqueraded as 'tame' muslims while planning the most vicious mass murder in our history.

The single reason I supported the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan was that it gave all the muslims all over the world who hate America and everything we stand for a place to come together and be violent to their hearts content trying to kill our soldiers there instead of plotting more and more vicious horrible murders of innocent civilians in our country. Yes, it cost the lives and grievous terrible harm to the men and women who fought and labored for us in Iraq and Afghanistan but that's what we were trained for; to fight the nation's wars in defense of the nation and people of this country. We all knew when we joined that in joining we accepted the possibility of great personal sacrifice.

There is not a smidgeon of difference between ISIS and Saudi Arabia. Their official and unofficial policies, acts and plans are identical: islam uber alles.

Shortly after it was published in 1982 I read a copy of a book by Frank Herbert. It was about a molecular biologist whose wife and family were wiped out by a terrorist bomb so he created a very selective plague in revenge.

John Ringo wrote a number of books about the Zombie Apocalypse and then followed that with it's ineluctable creation. It's really interesting.

The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse 

The general teaching on writing an essay or doing a speech is that you should open with a joke. Fortunately, the title has that covered for the words 'Inevitable' and 'Zombies' are automatically considered humor. It has to be, right?
Wrong. While there will be humor in this article, there is an inevitability to there being a zombie apocalypse (or at least something resembling it) and it is going to happen in our lifetimes. If worse does not occur first.
"Seriously, dude?" Yes, seriously. "WTF? You kiddin, right?" Nope.
The Zombie Apocalypse. Is. Inevitable. If you don't think so, you don't understand Moore's Law and nerds. 

Moore's Law (if you really don't know what it is, look it up) in some variance applies to all emerging technology. In Untold Histories Field Marshall William Slim noted that he liked to gauge the state of industrial technology's advancement between WWI and WWII by the increase in size and power of London City busses. Milling, steam, internal combustion, while they did not precisely 'double in power every eighteen months" all folllowed a fairly set trend of improvement and thus reduction in cost and difficulty of manufacture. Building an original Apple computer took the genius of the Great and Powerful Woz. Building one, now, is literaly child's play. (For values of children.) 

The same can be said of biotechnology. I recall a friend who worked in the Tropical and Emerging Diseases Lab, a Class Four Facility (highest contagion) located on the UGA campus and associated with the CDC who's team was attempting in the early Millenia to build a virus following the prescription of the first person to do so from scratch. They tried time and time again to replicate it and were unable. 

In 2005, five years later, a Newsweek reporter, buying materials from EBAy, did the same thing, literally, in his kitchen. (With Spanish Flu no less. He was later fired as was the editor who approved the story since they LAID OUT THE ENTIRE RECIPE!) 

That is how fast biotech advances. Moore's Law, to some extent or another, applies to all emerging technologies. One day it takes a genius, the next day anybody with the right IQ and background finds it to be child's play. 

Second point: A few years ago, at a bio conference in London, a researcher proudly stood up and showed that his lab had proven they could create an infection that would infect a vast swath of population (choose species, genus, phylum or family) but only kill ONE INDIVIDUAL based upon that individual's DNA.
When he asked for questions one member of the audience stood up and proclaimed: 

"We've known that in (university research center) for the last five years but we were never STUPID enough to speak about it in PUBLIC!" At which point things became shouty. 

By the same token, one can create a pathogen that will infect a vast population, but only target certain races. And, yes, there are clear markers to target race for values of race. It's a term of art in biology, not a term of politics. Westphailians, for example, have distinct genetic markers. Now, Westphalians are MOSTLY still found in Westphalia but the markers are found in a huge population elsewhere (especially the US.) But Negroid? Easy. Han Chinese. Very easy. Jewish. (Racially.) Blonde. (See Live Free Or Die) Etc. 'Northern European' (white) is just as easy. Choose your target or immune population. But be careful. You may not understand your population a well as you think. (The 'crazy' president of Iran is genetically turk but most of his supporters are fars which is a variant of Northern European.)

ROSETTA IMAGES

There are some fascinating space related sites that describe and show the Rosetta Comet mission.

The close-in photos of the comet are here.  The details of the orbit mechanics for the complete mission are rendered in a fascinating 3D graphic located here.

NEWS GOONS

You just know that somehow the local affiliate of CBS in New York have this story wrong. Honestly, they think they need the entire staff of a metropolitan New York City hospital to treat one ebola patient? But don't worry, there's no danger and you're a senseless hysteric if you imagine anything else. I'm no hysteric but don't you wonder at a government that does quarantine the soldiers it ordered to west Africa but not the other people who travel here from west Africa?

Have you noticed the catechism of the government science types? All of them fell reliably into Al Gore's dream and then declared anybody that disagreed with the idea of man-made global warming was a "science skeptic," possibly even a mouth-breather too stupid to live and unworthy of notice. The last poll I saw showed that 94% of Americans don't believe the CDC anymore or anything the official government spokespeople have to say about ebola.

Making skeptics of us all.